Transcribing the Times: Michel Houellebecq and the Genealogy of Cultural Decline

Authors: Van Calster, P.

Journal: Liverpool Law Review

Publication Date: 01/04/2026

Volume: 47

Issue: 1

Pages: 47-68

eISSN: 1572-8625

ISSN: 0144-932X

DOI: 10.1007/s10991-026-09402-x

Abstract:

Contemporary Western societies are marked by a striking paradox: unprecedented material comfort coexists with rising depression, social alienation, and the commodification of intimacy. This paper examines how Michel Houellebecq’s fiction captures and interrogates these late-modern tensions. His novels offer a sharp literary diagnosis of contemporary Western life, depicting societies shaped by exhaustion, fragmentation, and a pervasive loss of meaning, in which individuals struggle to sustain stable identities, relationships, and purposes. Drawing on philosophical, sociological, and anthropological theories of decline, the paper situates Houellebecq’s work within broader debates on civilizational fatigue, institutional weakening, and emotional and symbolic depletion. It argues that Houellebecq’s fiction resonates strongly with contemporary social and socio-economic conditions in Western societies. By linking his literary worlds to theories of civilizational decline and metaphysical fatigue, the analysis shows how Houellebecq renders the lived consequences of late modernity visible and concrete.

Source: Scopus